Update: Engrossed Second Substitute House Bill 1110 passed 53-43-0-2 this evening after 9 amendments and hours of debate. It now goes to the Senate, where it faces an even tougher audience.
5:00 Wednesday is the deadline for bills to get voted out of their original chamber.
Second Substitute House Bill 1110, which would bring Washington up to speed with California and Oregon on fuel pollution standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is still sitting on the floor calendar. Even though the bill won’t get Washington’s climate emissions headed downward by the 2020 deadline set by many scientists, every bit helps.
SHB 1793, the surviving bill to allow Seattle to use automated camera enforcement for its bus lanes, is also still on the floor calendar. The bill would allow Seattle to use the cameras for other neat purposes too, like fining box blockers, crosswalk blockers, and emergency vehicle blockers.
These bills might not come to a vote at all if representatives don’t hear from their constituents that the bills are important.
You can look up your legislators’ contact information here.
My legislators are a bunch of conservative DBs, so I won’t bother. There is no use in arguing with a wall or a box of rocks. Been there, done that.
It never hurts to let them know what their constituents think.
I agree. You never know about these things. With regards to the automatic enforcement, I think the best argument is that it is like a parking ticket. It doesn’t go on your record, you can’t fight it when it occurs, but you just pay it. Like a parking it, I think it makes sense to have increasing fines. The first time it might be a mistake, but not the fifth.
Even if they don’t read the letter much they’ll tally it as “N comments for, N comments against”. That could mean something if there are an overwhelming number of comments against their position. The trick is how to make this visible to people other than the legislator, and to the next legislator in that position, so they can’t just bury the information and nobody would know. When you submit comments to an EIS, the comments are published in the report, and when ST asks for feedback it often gives a summary of how many people responded for or against something. But how do you apply that to a legislator? If you write to a city councilmember you can cc the other councilmembers. But if you cc legislators in other cities, they may not care.
The alert that was posted this (Wednesday) morning, links to a form-letter tool that keeps count of how many of that form letter have been sent through that tool. The effectiveness of form letters in general is questionable. The effectiveness of a scoreboard where the number runs into the 1000s makes a point. That tool can then provide whatever contact info the writers used, to add to their own contact list.
Just emailing legislators directly gets a better response out of an individual legislator, if they have time to see it before debate on the issue, especially if it is not a form letter. Ambitious political operatives can than submit an Open Records Request for all correspondence the legislator received on that bill, and mine them for contact info.